A bumper year

Tuesday saw yet another new temperature high reached in London. The BBC informs us that sales of air conditioning units have gone through the roof.  In France the man with anger management issues phones to say it's 36C and muggy and he's thinking of spending the night sleeping by the pool to keep cool. Up here it reached 17C. Today maybe a tad cooler. We planned to have dinner in the garden but the temperature plummeted and the wind picked up the very second the table was laid. Last year we saw an influx of cool weather tourists trying to escape the heat in Madrid or Milan. I think we'll see the same this year. 

5:30 am. The farmers 19 year old can be seen driving a tractor in the potato field. He's finished his exams in Edinburgh. In two weeks he's off to Boston with his brother. Down by the potato barns we meet his mother out walking the Jack Russells. She makes the observation that when it comes to male offspring ' the years go by so quickly but the days are so long'.  There is a particular emphasis on the second 'so'.

This is a day for painting the garden benches which are looking a little faded after the winter storms.

In the supermarket all the headlines are about financial fraud in a local political party. The party Treasurer has misappropriated £400,000. He's used the money to buy a £100,000 motor home and a £3,000 coffee maker. He also bought a Lalique pepper grinder for £2,600 which must be some sort of record for pepper grinders. The list of bizarre purchases is oddly fascinating .  I can't help but feel that a £400,000 fraud would be considered small change in some places.

The bookstore calls to say part of our latest order is in. Three more books are due tomorrow. The author of the book on 'Weimar. Life on the edge of catastrophe ' will in town for a reading later in the week. We buy the last two remaining tickets. There is something about the title that is making the event extremely popular. A few of the bookstores staff are heading off to pastures new - Oakland, Fiji and Shetland. We shall miss their kind gentility. An American lady golfer in buying a book on Rory Mcilroy over hears our conversations and tells the lad that's heading to Oakland that Chez Panisse isn't what it used to be. I'm not sure he'd be dining there on the salary of a young faculty member but he thanks her for the information.

Bins. I'm sure there must be a better way of collecting rubbish. The impact of bins on the townscape is heavy and intrusive.  I'd like to criticize the local council but I can't think of a better way of doing things in an old medieval town centre.

Exotic things popping up in the garden. The warm weather has also brought out the butterflies that swarm over the buddlejas in the rockery. 2026 looks set to be a bumper year for butterflies. 

The peony looks pink at sunrise but has turned into something salmon pink by dinner time. Perhaps tomorrow it will be in full bloom and I can photograph it properly.

Things I didn't know. There are 200,000 Mennonites in Latin America farming an area he size of the Netherlands :https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1747423X.2020.1855266#abstract

Books:https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/why-are-you-reading-fewer-books

Carrots :https://www.sciencenorway.no/culture-food-and-health-war/where-the-carrot-myth-comes-from/2665915

And some more Norwegian common sense on viper bites . The gardens at the house in Italy used to be besieged by the things. They particulalrly loved the shade and cool of the pool house:https://www.sciencenorway.no/animal-world-ntb-english-snake/bitten-by-a-viper-heres-what-you-should-never-do/2665812